Dickens, Charles John Huffam (1812-1870), probably the best-known and,
to many people, the greatest English novelist of the 19th century. A
moralist, satirist, and social reformer, Dickens crafted complex plots
and striking characters that capture the panorama of English society.
Dickens's novels criticize the injustices of his time, especially the
brutal treatment of the poor in a society sharply divided by differences
of wealth. But he presents this criticism through the lives of
characters that seem to live and breathe. Paradoxically, they often do
so by being flamboyantly larger than life: The 20th-century poet and
critic T. S. Eliot wrote, "Dickens's characters are real because there
is no one like them." Yet though these characters range through the
sentimental, grotesque, and humorous, few authors match Dickens's
psychological realism and depth. Dickens's novels rank among the
funniest and most gripping ever written, among the most passionate and
persuasive on the topic of social justice, and among the most
psychologically telling and insightful works of fiction. They are also
some of the most masterful works in terms of artistic form, including
narrative structure, repeated motifs, consistent imagery, juxtaposition
of symbols, stylization of characters and settings, and command of
language.
Dickens established (and made profitable) the method of first publishing
novels in serial installments in monthly magazines. He thereby reached a
larger audience including those who could only afford their reading on
such an installment plan. This form of publication soon became popular
with other writers in Britain and the United States.
II Early Years
Dickens was born in Portsmouth, on England's southern coast. His father
was a clerk in the British Navy pay office a respectable position, but
with little social status. His paternal grandparents, a steward
(property manager) and a housekeeper, possessed even less status, having
been servants, and Dickens later concealed their background. Dickens's
mother supposedly came from a more respectable family. Yet two years
before Dickens's birth, his mother's father was caught embezzling and
fled to Europe, never to return.
The family's increasing poverty forced Dickens out of school at age 12
to work in Warren's Blacking Warehouse, a shoe-polish factory, where the
other working boys mocked him as "the young gentleman." His father was
then imprisoned for debt. The humiliations of his father's imprisonment
and his labor in the blacking factory formed Dickens's greatest wound
and became his deepest secret. He could not confide them even to his
wife, although they provide the unacknowledged foundation of his
fiction.
Soon after his father's release from prison, Dickens got a better job as
errand boy in law offices. He taught himself shorthand to get an even
better job later as a court stenographer and as a reporter in
Parliament. At the same time, Dickens, who had a reporter's eye for
transcribing the life around him, especially anything comic or odd,
submitted short sketches to obscure magazines. The first published
sketch, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk" (later retitled "Mr. Minns and His
Cousin") brought tears to Dickens's eyes when he discovered it in the
pages of The Monthly Magazine in 1833. From then on his sketches, which
appeared under the pen name "Boz" (rhymes with "rose") in The Evening
Chronicle, earned him a modest reputation. Boz originated as a childhood
nickname for Dickens's younger brother Augustus.
Dickens became a regular visitor at the home of George Hogarth, editor
of The Evening Chronicle, and in 1835 became engaged to Hogarth's
daughter Catherine. Publication of the collected Sketches by Boz in 1836
gave Dickens sufficient income to marry Catherine Hogarth that year.
The marriage proved unhappy.
III Literary Career
Soon after
Sketches by Boz
appeared, the fledgling publishing firm of Chapman and Hall approached
Dickens to write a story in monthly installments. The publisher intended
the story as a backdrop for a series of woodcuts by the then-famous
artist Robert Seymour, who had originated the idea for the story. With
characteristic confidence, Dickens, although younger and relatively
unknown, successfully insisted that Seymour's pictures illustrate his
own story instead. After the first installment, Dickens wrote to the
artist he had displaced to correct a drawing he felt was not faithful
enough to his prose. Seymour made the change, went into his backyard,
and expressed his displeasure by blowing his brains out. Dickens and his
publishers simply pressed on with a new artist. The comic novel, The
Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, appeared serially in 1836 and
1837 and was first published in book form
The Pickwick Papers in 1837.
The runaway success of
The Pickwick Papers,
as it is generally known today, clinched Dickens's fame. There were
Pickwick coats and Pickwick cigars, and the plump, spectacled hero,
Samuel Pickwick, became a national figure. Four years later, Dickens's
readers found Dolly Varden, the heroine of Barnaby Rudge (1841), so
irresistible that they named a waltz, a rose, and even a trout for her.
The widespread familiarity today with Ebenezer Scrooge and his
proverbial hard-heartedness from
A Christmas Carol (1843) demonstrate that Dickens's characters live on in the popular imagination.
Dickens published 15 novels, one of which was left unfinished at his
death. These novels are, in order of publication with serialization
dates given first:
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836-1837; 1837);
The Adventures of Oliver Twist (1837-1839; 1838);
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839; 1839);
The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841; 1841);
Barnaby Rudge (1841);
Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844; 1844);
Dombey and Son (1846-1848; 1848);
The Personal History of David Copperfield (1849-1850; 1850);
Bleak House (1852-1853; 1853);
Hard Times (1854);
Little Dorrit (1855-1857; 1857);
A Tale of Two Cities (1859);
Great Expectations (1860-1861; 1861);
Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865; 1865); and
The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished; 1870).
Through his fiction Dickens did much to highlight the worst abuses of
19th-century society and to prick the public conscience. But running
through the main plot of the novels are a host of subplots concerning
fascinating and sometime ludicrous minor characters. Much of the humor
of the novels derives from Dickens's descriptions of these characters
and from his ability to capture their speech mannerisms and
idiosyncratic traits.
A Early Fiction
Dickens was influenced by the reading of his youth and even by the
stories his nursemaid created, such as the continuing saga of Captain
Murderer. These childhood stories, as well as the melodramas and
pantomimes he saw in the theater as a boy, fired Dickens's imagination
throughout his life. His favorite boyhood readings included picaresque
novels such as Don Quixote by Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes and Tom
Jones by English novelist Henry Fielding, as well as the Arabian
Nights. In these long comic works, a roguish hero's exploits and
adventures loosely link a series of stories.
The Pickwick Papers,
for example, is a wandering comic epic in which Samuel Pickwick acts as
a plump and cheerful Don Quixote, and Sam Weller as a cockney version
of Quixote's knowing servant, Sancho Panza. The novel's preposterous
characters, high spirits, and absurd adventures delighted readers.
After Pickwick, Dickens plunged into a bleaker world. In
Oliver Twist, he traces an orphan's progress from the workhouse to the criminal slums of London.
Nicholas Nickleby, his next novel, combines the darkness of
Oliver Twist with the sunlight of Pickwick. Rascality and crime are part of its jubilant mirth.
The Old Curiosity Shop
broke hearts across Britain and North America when it first appeared.
Later readers, however, have found it excessively sentimental,
especially the pathos surrounding the death of its child-heroine Little
Nell. Dickens's next two works proved less popular with the public.
Barnaby Rudge, Dickens's first historical novel, revolves around anti-Catholic riots that broke out in London in 1780. The events in
Martin Chuzzlewit
become a vehicle for the novel's theme: selfishness and its evils. The
characters, especially the Chuzzlewit family, present a multitude of
perspectives on greed and unscrupulous self-interest. Dickens wrote it
after a trip to the United States in 1842.
B Mature Fiction
Many critics have cited
Dombey and Son
as the work in which Dickens's style matures and he succeeds in
bringing multiple episodes together in a tight narrative. Set in the
world of railroad-building during the 1840s, Dombey and Son looks at the
social effects of the profit-driven approach to business. The novel was
immediately successful.
Dickens always considered
David Copperfield
to be his best novel and the one he most liked. The beginning seems to
be autobiographical, with David's childhood experiences recalling
Dickens's own in the blacking factory. The unifying theme of the book is
the "undisciplined heart" of the young David, which leads to all his
mistakes, including the greatest of them, his mistaken first marriage.
Bleak House
ushers in Dickens's final period as a satirist and social critic. A
court case involving an inheritance forms the mainspring of the plot,
and ultimately connects all of the characters in the novel. The dominant
image in the book is fog, which envelops, entangles, veils, and
obscures. The fog stands for the law, the courts, vested interests, and
corrupt institutions. Dickens had a long-standing dislike of the legal
system and protracted lawsuits from his days as a reporter in the
courts.
A novel about industry,
Hard Times, followed
Bleak House in 1854. In
Hard Times,
Dickens satirizes the theories of political economists through
exaggerated characters such as Mr. Bounderby, the self-made man
motivated by greed, and Mr. Gradgrind, the schoolmaster who emphasizes
facts and figures over all else. In Bounderby's mines, lives are ground
down; in Gradgrind's classroom, imagination and feelings are strangled.
The pervading image of
Little Dorrit
is the jail. Dickens's memory of his own father's time in debtors'
prison adds an autobiographical touch to the novel. Little Dorrit also
contains Dickens's invention of the Circumlocution Office, the archetype
of all bureaucracies, where nothing ever gets done. Through this
critique and others, such as the circular legal system in
Bleak House, Dickens also investigated the ways in which art makes meaning and the workings of his own narrative style.
A Tale of Two Cities
is set in London and Paris during the French Revolution (1789-1799). It
stands out among the novels as a work driven by incident and event
rather than by character and is critical both of the violence of the mob
and of the abuses of the aristocracy, which prompted the revolution.
The successful
Tale of Two Cities was soon followed by
Great Expectations,
which marked a return to the more familiar Dickensian style of
character-driven narrative. Its main character, Pip, tells his own
story. Pip's "great expectations" are to lead an idle life of luxury.
Through Pip, Dickens exposes that ideal as false.
Dickens's last complete novel is the dark and powerful
Our Mutual Friend.
A tale of greed and obsession, it takes place in an ill-lit and dirty
London, with images of darkness and decay throughout. Only 6 of the 12
intended parts of
Edwin Drood
had been completed by the time Dickens died. He intended it as a
mystery story concerning the disappearance of the title character.
IV Final Years
The end of Dickens's life was emotionally scarred by his separation from
his dutiful wife, Catherine, as the result of his involvement with a
young actress, Ellen Ternan. Catherine bore him ten children during
their 22-year marriage, but he found her increasingly dull and
unsympathetic. Against the advice of editors, Dickens published a letter
vehemently justifying his actions to his readers, who would otherwise
have known nothing about them.
Following the separation, Dickens continued his hectic schedule of
novel, story, essay, and letter writing (his collected letters alone
stretch thousands of pages); reform activities; amateur theatricals and
readings; in addition to nightly social engagements and long midnight
walks through London. His energy had always seemed to his friends
inhuman, but he maintained this activity in his later years in disregard
of failing health. Dickens died of a stroke shortly after his farewell
reading tour, while writing
The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
V Achievement
Dickens's social critique in his novels was sharp and pointed. As his
biographer Edgar Johnson observed in Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and
Triumph (1952), Dickens's criticism was aimed not just at "the cruelty
of the workhouse and the foundling asylum, the enslavement of human
beings in mines and factories, the hideous evil of slums where crime
simmered and proliferated, the injustices of the law, and the cynical
corruption of the lawmakers" but also at "the great evil permeating
every field of human endeavor: the entire structure of exploitation on
which the social order was founded."
British writer George Orwell felt that Dickens was not a revolutionary,
however, despite his criticism of society's ills. Orwell points out that
Dickens "has no constructive suggestions, not even a clear grasp of the
nature of the society he is attacking, only an emotional perception
that something is wrong." That instinctive feeling becomes so moving in
the novels because Dickens made the injustices he hated concrete and
specific, not abstract and general. His readers feel the abuses of
19th-century society as real through the life of his characters.
Underlying and reinforcing that illusion of reality, however, is a rich
and complicated system of symbolic imagery resulting from superb
artistry.
Through his characters, Dickens also touched a range of readers, which
was perhaps his greatest talent. As his friend John Forster wrote, his
stories enthralled "judges on the bench and boys in the street" alike.
The illiterate, often too poor to buy installments themselves, pooled
their pennies and got someone to read aloud to them.
Near the end of the serialization of
The Old Curiosity Shop,
crowds thronged to a New York pier to await the ship from London
carrying the latest installment. As it came to the dock people roared,
"Is Little Nell dead?" The pathetic death of the novel's child-heroine,
Nell Trent, became one of the most celebrated scenes in 19th-century
fiction. Such public concern over Little Nell's end guaranteed that
Dickens's social message would be heard, not only by his avid readers,
but also by those in power.
Dickens was a careful craftsman, with a strong sense of design; his
books were strictly outlined. Any current notions that Dickens's novels
are long because he was paid by the word, or sloppy because he wrote
them under pressure of monthly deadlines, are simply untrue. What
organizes Dickens's stories is sometimes not apparent at first glance,
although it makes sense in novels that emphasize character. It is the
logic of psychology, the tensions and contradictions of our drives and
emotions, which Dickens plumbed, laying side by side the best and the
worst of the human heart. This is a very different logic from the order
of realism that rests on common sense. Dickens detested common sense,
seeing in its seeming obviousness a form of tyranny.
The theater was a crucial influence on Dickens's work. As a young man
Dickens tried to go on stage, but he missed his audition because of a
cold. Not only did Dickens later write comic plays, melodramas, and
libretti (words for musical dramas), he was also often involved in
amateur theatricals for good causes, and spent his last two decades
reading his own stories to packed audiences. Dickens's readings were as
much a sensation in England and America as was his writing, and they
proved as profitable. The readings revealed the part of the man that
made him a practiced magician and hypnotist as well.
Dickens's love of the theatrical makes his works lend themselves readily
to media adaptations. Motion-picture or television versions exist for
almost every one of them.
A Christmas Carol
was one of the earliest to be adapted, first appearing as the silent
film Scrooge (1901), directed by Walter R. Booth. The most notable
adaptations include
A Christmas Carol (1938), directed by Edwin L. Marin and starring Reginald Owen, and, probably the most famous of all,
A Christmas Carol
(1951), directed by Brian Desmond Hart and starring Alastair Sim. A
later production titled Scrooged (1988) was directed by Richard Donner
and starred Bill Murray. David Lean directed the most famous of the many
versions of
Great Expectations (1946). The film Oliver! (1968), a musical based on
Oliver Twist
and directed by Carol Reed, won six Academy Awards. Nowadays people are
probably more familiar with the many BBC television miniseries
productions of Dickens's works.
